Friedman About Social Responsibility

I asked "have you read Friedman's famous article about the social responsibility of corporations?", the answer "no" might be disqualifying for comments about the role of government and businesses.

"Aside from the question of fact–I share Adam Smith's skepticism about the benefits that can be expected from "those who affected to trade for the public good"–this argument must be rejected on grounds of principle. What it amounts to is an assertion that those who favor the taxes and expenditures in question have failed to persuade a majority of their fellow citizens to be of like mind and that they are seeking to attain by undemocratic procedures what they cannot attain by democratic proce­dures. In a free society, it is hard for "evil" people to do "evil," especially since one man's good is another's evil."
http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html

Doing business is about you agreeing to buy what someone else wants to sell.  No coercion, voluntary exchange. There is no higher form of human interaction.

Government is the opposite - it has only coercion or threat of same to wield.

Liberty in Health Care?

I read about healthcare quite a bit, rarely find something I have not seen before.

Like the task-force draft, a Republican bill could give new nonprofit or employer-sponsored alliances the explicit task of verifying that a health plan’s contractually specified rights and obligations are (1) “such as might reasonably be agreed to by an informed, value-conscious consumer” and (2) “adequately specified in the contract” by: (a) reference to responsibly developed “clinical practice guidelines;” or (b) “general language altering [conventional] legal and professional standards;” or (c) identifying a disinterested arbiter to deal with ambiguous situations. The task force also negotiated a final clause providing strong assurance that no patient could be denied any significant, verified benefit of medical science.
http://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2017/06/25/the_missing_key_to_market-based_health_reform_110281.html

Why Obamacare Didn't Make Us Healthier

Part of why obamacare didn't make us healthier is that we are killing ourselves, and the health care system can't do much about that.

Speaking of studies, all of America has been participating in an experiment since 2010 to see if a federal effort to extend government-mandated insurance coverage to millions more people can improve our lives. Last year the Obama Administration bragged that 20 million adults had gained health insurance as a result of Mr. Obama’s so-called Affordable Care Act.

Given the Sanders logic, one might have expected to see a corresponding improvement in public health. But so far evidence that ObamaCare made us healthier has proven elusive, to say the least. In December the New York Times was among the many news outlets that had to share the embarrassing news:

American life expectancy is in decline for the first time since 1993, when H.I.V.-related deaths were at their peak. But this time, researchers can’t identify a single problem driving the drop, and are instead pointing to a number of factors, from heart disease to suicides, that have caused a greater number of deaths.

A study on mortality rates released on Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that Americans could expect to live for 78.8 years in 2015, a decrease of 0.1 from the year before. The overall death rate increased 1.2 percent — that’s about 86,212 more deaths than those recorded in 2014.
http://thegrayarea.org/?p=126743

Insurance doesn't create health, it doesn't prevent us from killing ourselves. 78% of mortality is tied to what we eat and how we live. It's gauche these days to blame anyone for anything bad that happens to them.  We are often to blame, nonetheless.

Insurance or care and what's the diff?

Under a long-standing convention unexamined in today’s debates, health insurance is one thing and health care is something else, the former’s principal purpose being to enable patients to afford the latter. Although consumers can choose among financing plans, the content (and thus the costliness) of the care they expect to receive is not negotiable. Instead, all insured patients are essentially entitled, by common law or otherwise, to both provider services meeting a poorly specified “standard of care” and plan payment for all care deemed “medically necessary.” These near-universal terms of entitlement amount to an industry-friendly system of command-and-control regulation because applying them requires reference to medical experts. The professional paradigm of medical care these experts bring with them essentially holds that patients should receive, at whatever cost, any service with some chance of yielding a medical benefit.
https://qz.com/1010259/the-100-billion-per-year-back-pain-industry-is-mostly-a-hoax/

Free Speech, Draw the Line

Anyone half-awake to American life in recent years knows there is a large effort under way to banish that bedrock principle of protection for words that offend. Free-speech traditions are under pressure on campuses, in high schools, in the media, in the streets and in sports.

That the court’s liberal justices— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan —joined the majority suggests these four see what is going on, that letting the ability to speak one’s mind slip away under this silencing weight will damage all Americans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/saving-chief-wahoo-1498084781

Hard to believe that anyone things the government should be involved in this stuff.  

Missed this one from 3 years ago ...

There are many, ahem, bombshells in this one.  I remember being there in 2006 and the guys I worked with said, "nope, we were looking for nukes and their precursors, didn't find any."
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390517/bush-didnt-lie-deroy-murdock

Nye's Ill Logic

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." At that point, there were maybe a billion humans on Earth, so we might forgive him for worrying. In 1800, the life expectancy of the average British citizen -- Britain then being the leading light of the world -- was 39 years. Most humans lived in pitiless poverty that is increasingly rare in most parts of the contemporary world.

Now, had Nye been around in the early 19th century, he'd almost surely have been smearing anyone skeptical of the miasma theory of disease. The problem is he lacks imagination; he's unable to understand that science is here to help humanity adapt and overcome, not constrict it. Anyway, 7-plus billion people later, extreme poverty was projected to fall below 10 percent for the first time ever in 2015. Most of those gains have been made in the midst of the world's largest population explosion.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/04/28/bill_nyes_view_of_humanity_is_repulsive_133738.html

There's a lot of bad science out there - people like to imply that everyone doing science is doing it well, and that is just not so.  People also like to pretend that science provides answers on complex questions that cannot be subjected to randomized trials, and that is also not so.

It is easy to believe that we're constructing a food system that delivers so much bad food with such a complex system of production and delivery that we have to run out one day.  Perhaps we will.  Killing people to prevent that ... ridiculous.

Pretending that our socialized nations could survive population decline is also ridiculous, and when the enlightened ones quit having kids they'll find that like the Shakers, their values rapidly decline in significance. Good luck with that meek idea to "not have a kid so you can save the world" idea.  The fertile will inherit the earth.